The GENES Blog (GEnealogy News and EventS): Top stories concerning ancestral research in Britain, Ireland, and their diasporas, from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit The GENES Blog if you do so. To contact me please email chrismpaton @ outlook.com.

These three websites have continued to grow since their respective launches. UKBMD.org.uk began first with just over 250 links to other websites - it now has over 2,400. Similarly UKGDL.org.uk and UKMFH.org.uk have also grown since their initial launches.

2014's 100 year anniversary of World War 1 has prompted a lot of interest in researching the many topics of WW1 on the Internet and so the team behind these three websites has been concentrating their efforts within UKMFH.org.uk into adding many more links to websites that have online information for WW1.

As with UKBMD.org.uk and UKGDL.org.uk , the website links within UKMFH.org.uk are all categorised by content and by county, but UKMFH.org.uk also has keywords.

On the UKMFH.org.uk menu the Category and County menu buttons will list links to websites relevant to your selection, but as the topic of Military Family History is so vast, it is often better to make use of the Keyword menu button. On the Keyword page the list of keywords is over 8,000 in length, so you have the option to refine the list by entering your interest. For example, enter Somme and click on the Refine the keywords button and the Keywords list will be reduced to those relevant to the various battles on the Somme. You can then select the keyword of specific interest and when you then click Search, the page that will be displayed will be links to all the sites that we know of relevant to this keyword topic.

Our aim with UKBMD.org.uk , UKGDL.org.uk and UKMFH.org.uk is that we do the searching so that the users do not have to. Many websites have useful information, but they do not appear at the top of Google's search results. We dig down past Google's (and other search engines) first page of results to find these websites and add links to them on the appropriate pages within our websites. In searching for WW1 related sites we are finding many sites with other military related themes and adding them too, so as always UKMFH.org.uk is not just for WW1 research.

So, we hope that as the interest in WW1 grows, UKMFH.org.uk can be of service to family historians researching their ancestors who played a part in the 1948-1918 war. It's free to use too!